


Occhiolism

by Anonymous



Series: 30 Day JohnJae Challenge [1]
Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Art Student Jung Yoonoh | Jaehyun, Hopeful Ending, Light Angst, M/M, Meet-Cute, Photographer Suh Youngho | Johnny, Sunsets, Winter Solstice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-30
Updated: 2020-11-30
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:15:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27802906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: The mysteries of life made Johnny feel empty sometimes and then he met Jaehyun
Relationships: Jung Yoonoh | Jaehyun/Suh Youngho | Johnny
Series: 30 Day JohnJae Challenge [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2034217
Comments: 2
Kudos: 19
Collections: Anonymous





	Occhiolism

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, this is my first time writing for johnjae and I am excited to share this. Please feel free to leave comments and kudos!

Johnny loved sunsets. He loved photographing the beautiful oranges and yellows and pinks fading into the blue-purple sky. He loved the peace and still that often came with the sunsets- not that that was very difficult in his small town. They would always say that sunsets represented the passage of time but to Johnny it was when time was at a standstill. It was a calm where it was little him in this big big world, where he felt full of wonder but also a bit melancholic.  _ Occhiolism.  _ When he learnt that word as he scoured Tumblr for hours on end it made so much sense. The smallness of his perspective, how no matter how unique his life was, it was only one of many possible lives. Maybe that’s why many people believed in and spoke of reincarnation. There were so many possibilities and so little time would the powers that be really only give people one life? Johnny met Jaehyun as the sun set, and Jaehyun was everything Johnny didn’t know.

Johnny fancied himself a misunderstood person, a person with layers that everyone had to pull back with his overpriced camera and his dirtied chucks. He hated being home for the holidays, his small town felt suffocating. And every time he felt he missed  _ it _ , his parents, the kids he went to highschool with, the target and froyo place where people went for fun? He would come back and remember why he left in the first place. And these winter holidays were bittersweet for him. He had all the things he wished for when he was homesick but it felt like something was missing. Something like, possibilities. Johnny doesn’t remember when he started taking his mom’s beat up sedan to take photos of sunsets in the winter, but he knows that he has no intention of ever stopping. If someone asked Johnny what made sunsets so special to him, he could never quite say. 

The one kind of sunset Johnny often failed to capture was the one when there was a winter solstice in December. When the humidity in his small town in Illinois was even lower, and the air felt crisp and it felt like the twilight lasted longer, and the colors streaking the sky didn't fade into the dark so quickly. The clouds would streak the sky, and something about it just added to the overall feeling. It made Johnny feel like he was the kid in an indie movie, having a moment of deep awakening. He never managed to quite capture the magic he felt when he looked up at the sky and watched the sun settle in the west. He couldn’t capture the moment that he met Jaehyun, armed with his own camera, staring up in awe with the camera dangling loosely in his hand as he sat near the lake, right where Johnny sat year after year since highschool, hoping to get a photo that could grasp how he felt looking at the sunset. And he could never capture the way that it felt to watch Jaehyun clumsily drop said camera when he opened his mouth to speak.  _ “I have to say I kind of saw this bit of lake as mine.”  _ Jaehyun was cute, Johnny decided. His cheeks flushed as he rushed to grasp at his camera. 

“Johnny.”

“Jaehyun.” 

They sat there, quietly, and it felt good.

From then on throughout the holidays they would meet without planning to, at the lake when the sun was about to take her rest. They never really asked each other questions, just settled with their cameras and stared at the sky. Sometimes they’d have other stuff with them and that is how Johnny would glean information about Jaehyun. The circled ads for rooms to rent in big cities, the paint stained bag, the crinkled greasy khaki of food from the convenience store. He wondered why Jaehyun was there, in this town where everyone knew everyone, and everyone had always been there. He thought of asking but he felt that the moments alone together with Jaehyun were borrowed time and well… He liked sitting next to this beautiful mystery boy rather than giving him a chance to be anything but what he imagined.

Did Jaehyun think of Johnny too? Did anything make Johnny interesting, give away material for Jaehyun to make up his own mystery boy? He kind of hoped so but maybe Jaehyun looked at his flannels and chucks and his batter poetry books and his brittle dyed shoulder length hair and was bored by him, the rebel without a cause, mad at the world about all the ways he’d never know it. Maybe he looked pretentious. Or seemed unlikable. But Jaehyun didn’t seem to mind when Johnny would sit by him and they’d quietly click snapshots of the sky, and Johnny thought, maybe coming home wasn’t so bad. When he thought Jaehyun wasn’t looking he’d admire his face, that little twinkle in his eyes. Jaehyun made the type of face that made you think that he had never seen a sunset before. Like his perspective was so much wider and yet Johnny had accompanied him, knew that he had seen the sun set dozens maybe even thousands of times. Yet Jaehyun looked content, content to take a few snaps and then just sit.

“I’m leaving soon.” It felt like someone dunked Johnny’s head under water. He turned his head to look at Jaehyun and was taken aback to see Jaehyun looking right at him. He didn’t know what to say so instead he just tilted his head at Jaehyun. Jaehyun seemed to expect this, giving him a small smile.

“We’ve sat together for days on end, wouldn’t you at least want to know that you’ll have to occupy the lakeside alone?” Johnny felt kind of sad and panicked. 

“I’ll never see you again?” He asked, too embarrassed to outright say that he liked Jaehyun because well… He didn’t know him, not really. Jaehyun didn’t speak for a moment, just looking at his face.

“I didn’t say that. Is that what you actually want to ask me?” Johnny didn’t want to ask that. He didn’t actually know what he wanted to ask so he just blurted out the first question that came to mind.

“Have you heard of occhiolism?” Johnny had no idea where he was going with this. “It is this idea that like you are so small in this world and you’ll never get to know the vastness of it. Like your perspective is tiny on its own. And you hate it.” 

“Hate it?”

“Hate it.”

There was a pause. And then.

“Johnny what does this have to do with anything?”

Here goes nothing.

“I would like to get to know you and now you’re leaving when all I have is the idea of you.” He finally said it. The bonus was if Jaehyun wasn’t curious about him Johnny could pick up some mini pizzas at Target and beers and then lock himself in his childhood bedroom.

“I’d like to get to know you too. I’m glad you could move past staring holes into whatever I carried in my hands.” Johnny flushed. So he noticed. “Like seriously Johnny it's like you thought that your eyes could move shit.” Jaehyun was a cheeky bastard.

“Yeah yeah well can you give me your number whilst you make fun of me?” Jaehyun ignored Johnny pulling out his phone and rummaged his bag until he procured a marker. He wrote a number on Johnny’s forearm with a messy scrawl with  _ Jaehyun, Potential Soulmate  _ written underneath.

Night fell as they walked to their cars with stars scattering the sky. Johnny looked to the sky with a twinkle in his own eyes and a spring in his step. It felt like something of an awakening.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading my fic, please don't forget to leave comments and kudos!


End file.
